Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

A planned fire burned through needles, branches and logs around sequoias and other trees on June 11 in Kings Canyon National Park.Credit National Park Service/ R. Paterson

Photo

Legal scholars and philosophers focused on the environment discussed the evolving notion of wilderness at a workshop high in the Sierras.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

In this centennial year of the National Park System, it’s been encouraging to see management of the western components of this remarkable ecological patrimony shifting ever so slowly toward incorporating knowledge of natural cycles of fire in maintaining forest health. For forests in California’s Sierra Nevada, particularly, a dangerous and ecologically disruptive “fire deficit” has been built through generations of land policies fixated on fire suppression.

In early June, I was fortunate to see an all-too-rare prescribed burn while spending several days in Kings Canyon National Park, mainly at a fascinating workshop hosted by the University of Illinois law and philosophy program focused on the evolving meanings of both “wilderness” and “wildness” on a planet increasingly shaped by humans.

But we also got to explore, spending some time in the Redwood Canyon section of the park, where several trails wind through the world’s largest grove of giant sequoias. We met up with a Park Service fire crew readying the area for a prescribed burn over the following week. Click here to track how the operation was carried out.

The problem?

It took 13 years to carry out this one 760-acre planned fire. The state’s stringent air quality rules add vast regulatory obligations to planned a managed fire but don’t apply if the same area ends up burning on its own — as would be inevitable. Read on for more on that issue. Read more…

The discussion was happily recorded by Heleo, a web enterprise devoted to fostering consequential conversations. Read on for excerpts from the video and Heleo’s helpful transcript, but I encourage you to watch and/or read the longer conversation at the links below: Read more…

“To everything (turn, turn, turn), there is a season (turn, turn turn), and a time to every purpose, under heaven,” as my departed friend Pete Seeger wrote and sang.

My purpose has long been to help people make sense of the momentous environmental and social changes under way on this “pale blue dot” called Earth, the forces behind those changes, and what policies and practices can foster human progress while limiting regrets.

My purpose will not change, but early next month I enter a new season, moving to a new platform and an old approach.

It’s an incredible opportunity. What’s not to like about an organization that is both centered on the most important form of journalism — investigative reports with “moral force” — and agile enough to be hiring an “engagement reporter” and to build innovative online tools like Electionland, which used citizen reports to home in on potential problems with ballot access?

It’s no wonder that in less than a decade of existence, ProPublica has garnered three Pulitzer Prizes as well as Emmy Awards for its collaborations with the PBS series “Frontline.”

In today’s communication climate, I can’t imagine a better home and job as I head into my fourth decade writing on humanity’s increasingly two-way relationship with the climate system.

Climate campaigners have embraced the fight, seeing another Keystone-style focal point in their “keep it in the ground” push against fossil fuels. That might work symbolically and energize progressives, but oil is a global commodity and will find a path from wells to markets as long as demand persists. (Even Elon Musk conceded last April* that oil will be needed for a long time to come.)

The prime issue along the current pipeline route is the one that energized the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native Americans many months ago — a pattern of deep injustice.

It’s a pattern that extends back to the erosion of treaty rights starting in the 1860s through court fights following U.S. Army Corps of Engineers damming projects along the Missouri River, according to Peter Capossela, an attorney specializing in federal Indian law who has represented the Standing Rock tribe in the past.

When you have time, listen to Capossela in an interview with TYT Politics Reporter Jordan Chariton. “The Corps issuing the permits for Dakota Access is part of a long history of oppression against Standing Rock,” Capossela told Chariton, adding: “The war against the standing rock Sioux tribe is the longest war in American history, and this is a new front.”

Hopefully, there’s enough logic and power in the basic justice issue, in which a pipeline route was redrawn to avoid mainly-white populations and property north of Bismarck, to carry the day once the election is over.

The Dakota and Lakota of the Standing Rock tribe would hardly be the first American Indians to pay the price for white people who want to move environmental hazards out of sight, out of mind and out of their water faucets. If the federal government shifts the pipeline route again — perhaps closer to Bismarck — maybe that will prompt a full, meaningful discussion of the pipeline’s merits, with a fairer assessment of its true costs.

A pipeline may well be the most profitable and efficient way to move a half-million barrels of crude oil a day across the Plains. But in a time of oil gluts and plummeting oil prices, is it worth it? Is it worth the degradation of the environment, the danger to the water, the insult to the heritage of the Sioux?

To learn more, a great starting point is a map created by Carl M. Sack, a geographer and cartographer studying at the University of Wisconsin whose wider body of work can be explored at Northlandia.com:

Photo

A map of the original and current routes of the Dakota Access Pipeline, by Carl M. Sack, a geographer and cartographer at the University of Wisconsin. For a large printable printable version of the map, click here.Credit Carl M. Sack

Sack stands with those hoping to stop the pipeline altogether. That legal, political, ethical and economic issue will play out in the weeks ahead.

What excites me here most is that a young cartographer, sensing an unbalanced visual landscape, has worked to fill the gap.

I’m reminded of Jamie Serra, a young employee of the Pennsylvania state legislature who sought to clarify issues in the shale-gas regions of that state by creating the Fracktrack.org website using government data on well sites, permits, violations and more. I wrote on such mapping in 2012.

Sack’s closing thought in his post nicely captures the issue and opportunity in such situations:

I felt strongly that there still needed to be a map of the area that would look familiar to most viewers and orient them to the important geographic facts of the struggle. I don’t claim that none of those facts are currently in dispute, but I recognize that all maps (even road maps overlaid with pink polygons) take a position and create knowledge based on the cartographer’s point of view. Maps have great power, and it’s a power anyone with pen and paper or a computer can wield.

My Wisconsin-bred geographer hero Zoltan Grossman once declared, “The side with the best maps wins.” The pipeline company has an army backed by state power to do its bidding. The water has its scrappy protectors. It’s time we put the latter on the map.

Dr. Ralph Cicerone, a prominent atmospheric chemist, was president of the National Academy of Sciences from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2016. He died on Saturday, Nov. 5. He was 73. This photograph was taken at the academy in 2006.Credit Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

See postscripts | I’m saddened to have to mark the death on Saturday of Ralph J. Cicerone, a brilliant atmospheric scientist who skillfully shifted into academic leadership as chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, but really hit his stride through a decade, just ended in June, as president of the National Academy of Sciences.

In that position, Cicerone had a remarkable — and all too rare — habit of listening, and of aiming to maintain a tone of civility, even as the atmosphere around science, and particularly climate science, grew heated and polarized through his time in Washington. He stepped down a year before his second term would have been up, and had been slowing down a bit, according to academy officials.

In the first episode of the climate series “Years of Living Dangerously,” David Letterman, at left, talks with Indian children about studying by lamplight.Credit National Geographic Channel

Photo

Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from the global-warming documentary “Before the Flood.”Credit National Geographic

Remember that wave of angst and suspicion among environmentalists when the Murdoch family’s 21st Century Fox paid $725 million to form a for-profit joint venture with National Geographic? The logic of the move for the venerable publishing, education and science society lay in creating a predictable and large flow of money to support its work. The fears centered on the prospect that the Fox News approach to issues like climate change would spill across National Geographic, from the magazine to the TV programming. There were tough staff cuts right away, but where in media companies (including this one) is that not the case these days?

Revised and updated, 10 p.m. | Science has long been focused mainly on knowledge frontiers, with universities often seeming to track “impact factors” of published papers more than a researcher’s impact in the real world.

But there’s been a welcome effort, of late, particularly in fields relevant to sustainable development, to shift priorities toward helping communities address challenges as humanity’s “great acceleration” plays out in the next few decades. An early iteration of this call came in a 1997 essay on “the virtues of mundane science” by Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael R. Dove of Yale. (I discussed the essay in a lecture last year.)

It seems such efforts are gaining steam. For example, consider the growth of the Thriving Earth Exchange, an effort by the American Geophysical Union to help connect its global network of scientists with communities seeking science-based solutions to a variety of vexing problems: Read more…

3) Consider the cost, in lives and money, exacted by today’s climatic extremes, let alone those worsened by warming. Many such costs can be reduced by developing suitable crops and water systems or building resilient communities. But not all. Then, on a very long time scale, consider the prospect of an inevitable new ice age.

Sifting these notions, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there will almost certainly come a moment when humans will start designing our climate and not simply perpetually adapt to its vagaries.

With all of this in mind, it could be argued that the momentum driving global warming is simply speeding the journey toward an inevitable juncture when we will start engineering the climate.

We’ve been terrible at managing emissions. Can we shift from unintended global warming to managing climate by design?

Welcome to the geoengineering debate.

I encourage anyone interested in climate change science and policy to read on for the rich discussion of geoengineering that follows, involving some of the analysts and scientists most involved in examining next steps. They include Oliver Morton of The Economist, Raymond Pierrehumbert of Oxford University, and Gernot Wagner and David Keith of Harvard.

About

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.